Editors

Mom of girl kidnapped 20 years ago says she wishes police never found her

The mother of Kamiyah Mobley, who was found alive nearly 20 years after she was kidnapped from a Florida hospital, wishes “they would never have found her.”

Though Shanara Mobley said finding her daughter “was one of the happiest days” of her life, they do not have contact and the devastated mother has even blocked her phone number, she told the Florida Times-Union.

“We were going to be this big, happy family,” Mobley said.

Kamiyah Mobley was abducted shortly after her birth at a Jacksonville hospital in 1998 by Gloria Williams, who admitted she took the baby after her own pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage.

Williams, 52, raised Kamiyah in South Carolina as Alexis Manigo, a name she has continued to go by.

Mobley told the Times-Union that her daughter still calls Williams “mommy,” they talk on the phone and she considers the people she was raised around family.

And though Manigo reportedly continues to send Mother’s Day cards to the woman who raised her, Mobley said her mailbox has sat empty on the holiday.

“I don’t deal with disrespect,” she tearfully told the newspaper.

Tensions had previously come to a head during Williams’ sentencing hearing, during which Williams was ordered to serve 18 years in prison.

Manigo apparently learned of her true identity about a year and a half before Williams’ arrest, but asked the court for leniency against Williams, who wept on the stand.

“I’m so sorry,” Williams said. “As for Kamiyah, I never meant to hurt you.”

Manigo’s biological father, Craig Aiken, had told the court that the family was shattered by the abduction.

“That day she took Kamiyah, she destroyed me and Shanara,” Aiken said.

Mobley has five other children, aged 3 to 15, whom she has worried about in the aftermath of the discovery of their oldest sister.

“This is what Gloria [Williams] and Kamiyah brought upon my children,” she told the paper. “And I truly feel it in my heart; I just wish she would not have come back. I really do. Because [Kamiyah] came back, this has made a mockery of my life. I’m still lost. I don’t have a relationship with my child. What did I gain? Nothing.”